{"id":1225,"date":"2023-06-28T10:42:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T17:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2023-06-29T10:29:12","modified_gmt":"2023-06-29T17:29:12","slug":"igor-levit-in-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/igor-levit-in-san-francisco\/","title":{"rendered":"Igor Levit in San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of us in the Bay Area who care about classical music, the last two weeks have\u00a0mainly been taken up with Igor Levit’s residency at the San Francisco Symphony<\/a>. I\u00a0wrote about\u00a0this marvelous pianist\u00a0last fall<\/a>, after hearing him perform all twenty-four of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues in one Carnegie evening,\u00a0and if you’ve read that wildly enthusiastic post,\u00a0you’ll be unsurprised to learn\u00a0how eagerly I attended all four of the concerts he gave at San Francisco’s Davies Hall.<\/p>\n

The first, and in some ways the most straightforwardly delightful, was\u00a0a Friday night concert in which Esa-Pekka Salonen (who is himself a great and ongoing gift to the San Francisco Symphony) conducted two Beethoven pieces: the Piano Concerto No. 5, in which Igor Levit was the soloist, and the\u00a0much-loved\u00a0Eroica<\/em> symphony, No. 3. The piano concerto came first, and Levit’s mastery of the\u00a0music\u00a0was a pleasure to behold. Playing without a score, he seemed especially alert to what the other musicians were doing and feeling, so that his interactions with the orchestra were both seamless and communicative. As for his own solo passages, they ranged from the delicately near-silent to the thrillingly emphatic\u2014never in an idiosyncratic or perverse way, but in a manner that seemed utterly suited to Beethoven’s intentions.\u00a0 Even Levit’s bodily gestures (his turns of the head to look around, his relaxed\u00a0way of keeping the rhythm with hands, arms, and even legs) suggested that this collaboration was a pleasure to him\u00a0as well as to his fellow performers.\u00a0Afterwards, and just before the intermission,\u00a0he responded\u00a0to the\u00a0audience’s repeated ovations\u00a0by giving us a lovely little\u00a0encore of uncharacteristically tuneful Shostakovich (the Waltz Scherzo, as it turned out, from the Ballet Suite No. 1). So by the time we got to the program’s second half,\u00a0even the beautifully played Eroica<\/em>\u00a0symphony felt a bit like elegant wallpaper: that is, something you were glad to have surrounding you, but not a revelation in the same way Levit’s Emperor<\/em> concerto was.<\/p>\n

That Sunday I went back to hear Levit in a chamber music concert, in which he joined several\u00a0string players\u00a0from the San Francisco Symphony in a well-thought-out program. I was shocked by how poorly attended it was, compared to the Beethoven\u00a0\u2014 but then, chamber music almost always draws a smaller crowd than symphonies, and since Davies sadly lacks a chamber-music auditorium,\u00a0the SFS is forced to hold\u00a0these more intimate concerts in the large hall. In the event, the concert was just as rewarding as the Friday night had been, with\u00a0three unusual string pieces (Frank Bridge’s 1912 Lament<\/em>, and Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz<\/em> and Emily’s Reel<\/em> from the 1990s) played by Symphony musicians. This turned out to be the perfect set-up for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, which formed the second half of the concert. I have loved this piece since the very first time I heard it (with Anne-Marie McDermott at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center<\/a>, almost twenty years ago), and it was even better this time,\u00a0in Levit’s gracefully collaborative, distinctly enunciated performance. In a way that is not at all easy to do,\u00a0the pianist managed to capture both Shostakovich’s appealing wit and the composer’s\u00a0dark-tinged anxiety (the concerto dates from 1940, shortly after Stalin’s terrifying critique of Shostakovich, and just at the beginning of the war). Of the four SFS musicians who accompanied Levit in this adventure, Melissa Kleinbart on the first violin and Amos Yang on the cello were particular standouts, though all four were really good.<\/p>\n

Then, on the following Saturday. it was time for the big event:\u00a0Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto in C major, which Igor Levit,\u00a0with Salonen’s help and support,\u00a0had dredged up from the archives and\u00a0brought to life again. Busoni, who lived from 1866 to 1924, was an Italian who settled for much of his life in Berlin. (I have actually seen the plaque on the house where he lived in Viktoria-Luisa-Platz, the same building Billy Wilder\u00a0was to occupy a few years after Busoni’s death.) It took him three years, from 1901 to 1904, to write\u00a0his Opus 39: a fiendish piano concerto,\u00a0seventy-five minutes long, with a piano part so fast and complicated that few people\u00a0have ever been able to play it.<\/span><\/p>\n

This concerto, I have to say,\u00a0is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. Five movements long, it ends with a choral passage in German, sung by a male chorus and apparently representing “mysticism in nature.” But even before then it does not sound anything like your usual piano concerto. The speed at which Levit had to play his assigned notes was so extreme that his page-turner (whom he needed in this case to handle the paper score) often had to get out of his seat every\u00a0minute or so to turn the page.\u00a0The music was incredibly loud at times, and with the combination of drums from the orchestra and repeated pounding chords on the piano, it was also incredibly percussive. Which is not to say that it lacked melody: there were sustained harmonious passages that, while not exactly hummable,\u00a0evoked a sense of something tunefully familiar. These could never be pinned down, though, because as soon as Busoni had accomplished one\u00a0new thing with the orchestra and the piano, he was on to the next.\u00a0If I had simply heard it without being prepared in any way, I would not have been able to say whether\u00a0this concerto\u00a0was composed in 1812, 2012, or somewhere in between; the musical forms it drew on could have\u00a0arisen any time in those two centuries, but they were not forms I have heard from anyone else.\u00a0The whole piece struck me as a genetic “sport”\u2014an evolutionary dead end, a one-of-a-kind development that took things as far as they could go and left nothing for followers to do. Given the difficulty of the piano’s role (and, I imagine, even the orchestra’s), it was no surprise to find that the work has lain fallow for most of the many decades since its composition.\u00a0Still, in Levit’s hands\u00a0it was\u00a0continually exciting\u2014not for a single second was I bored\u2014and\u00a0we in the audience all felt privileged to witness its revival, even if we did not always know what to make of it.<\/p>\n

I thought fondly back to the Busoni evening as I listened to the fourth concert in Levit’s series, a\u00a0recital that began with Brahms’s Six Choral Preludes and ended with Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, with pieces by jazz pianist Fred Hersch and\u00a0a piano adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde<\/em>\u00a0Prelude in between. There was a connection between the two concerts, not just in the fact that Busoni had arranged the Brahms, but also in the semi-Wagnerian\u00a0adventurousness that I only now realized I had heard in the Busoni. But the Liszt, for me, was a trial: lots of virtuosity, lots of heavy\u00a0emphasis\u00a0alternating with hesitant thoughtfulness on the piano keys, but with none of the payback that had been afforded in the case of Beethoven, Shostakovich, and (to a lesser extent) Busoni.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0was\u00a0a\u00a0rather odd way for Levit to choose to end what had been an eye-opening, utterly thrilling residency.\u00a0But\u00a0I was clearly in the minority in my reaction, because the crowd that attended Tuesday’s recital once again roared to its feet at the concert’s end, just as it had\u00a0for the Beethoven and the Busoni.\u00a0 That avidly applauding, bravo-screaming San Francisco audience seemed, in a way, like a slavering beast\u2014as if\u00a0Igor Levit were a delicious morsel\u00a0meant to feed\u00a0his fans’\u00a0all-consuming hunger, if only they could get close enough to swallow him.\u00a0I found it\u00a0almost frightening, how much they adored him\u2026even if, throughout most of\u00a0his residency, I also felt that way myself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of us in the Bay Area who care about classical music, the last two weeks have\u00a0mainly been taken up with Igor Levit’s residency at the San Francisco Symphony. I\u00a0wrote about\u00a0this marvelous pianist\u00a0last fall, after hearing him perform all … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[225,28,27,562,34,651,686,685,555,563,687,125,21,392],"class_list":["post-1225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-anne-marie-mcdermott","tag-beethoven","tag-brahms","tag-busoni","tag-chamber-music-society-of-lincoln-center","tag-esa-pekka-salonen","tag-frank-bridge","tag-fred-hersch","tag-igor-levit","tag-liszt","tag-mark-oconnor","tag-san-francisco-symphony","tag-shostakovich","tag-wagner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1256,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions\/1256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}